On the Verge

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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

I am thrilled to announce that my novel, Lauren Takes Leave, is now available for purchase at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. Click HERE to go to the book's page on Amazon!

IMPORTANT! In other news, my blog has been moved to my new website, www.juliegerstenblatt.com. I will not be updating this On the Verge site after July, 2012. All new content -- plus the older posts -- can now be found at one convenient cyber-location. I'd love to have you follow me there!

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

We moms have it hard in May and June.The social calendar that we tend to
throughout the year virtually explodes for the spring season, with graduation
parties and birthday parties and class parties and final exams and proms and
cookies to bake and brownies to bake and teachers to thank and yearbooks to
distribute and camp trunks to pack and backpacks to unpack and trip forms to
fill out and letters to send to camp and Father’s Day to plan and little league
playoffs and final recitals and band concerts and about a million other
obligations that keep our heads spinning.Until now.Because now, we
have reached Nirvana.We have
reached the end of June.

Ah.Say it with me.The end of June.Now exhale.

At
the end of June, and well into July and August, Mommy needs – no, Mommy deserves - a cocktail.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

I recently got the chance to try a class at Yoga Haven 2,
located at 91 Montgomery Avenue in Scarsdale.The studio, owned by Betsy Kase, is the new outpost of the
beloved Tuckahoe yoga studio, which Kase first opened 15 years ago.

This is not me.

“Back
then, Madonna was on the cover of Time
magazine doing yoga, and people couldn’t believe that you could look like her
from doing only that,” Kase explained.“Now, people have more understanding of it.”In the past few years, in addition to growing her studio
across the board, she has seen an increased interest from prenatal clients,
seniors, men, and even children.

“Eleven
year olds spend 8 hours a day sitting in a chair in school,” she said.And then they go to play sports,
sports, sports nonstop, without much stretching, “so they are getting tighter
and tighter,” which can be rough on the body.That’s why Yoga Haven offers a variety of classes for kids
and teens, including a Monday evening class just for boys.“We do handstands and hang from ropes,
and lots of other fun things,” she explained.

Now,
as you may know from other articles I’ve written, I am into spinning, not stretching. But after pulling my calf from three
consecutive days of fast, repetitive pedaling, I knew that I needed to try
something else. Continue here.

Friday, June 8, 2012

You know that feeling you get from holding a new book in
your hands, excited by the promise of the first few pages? That’s how I felt when I first read A Girl Named Digit by Annabel
Monaghan. It was a Saturday
morning. My Kindle and I crept
downstairs in the dim morning light and hid under a blanket on the far end of
the couch in the sunroom, pretending that we were still asleep. In that way, I disappeared from my
family’s radar for the better part of the morning, and by the time they found
me and begged for breakfast, I was already hooked on Digit.

And
that was good news, because before reading her novel, I was already hooked on
Annabel Monaghan.

Annabel and I met in a novel
writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence College in the Fall of 2010. She was there to workshop a project
called Digit, and since her novel was completed and the rest of ours were not,
we read her manuscript first. In
person, Annabel is funny and self-deprecating and humble and smart. She’s the one you want to sit next to
in class so that you can pass notes back and forth and give each other
meaningful eye rolls, as if a continuing education course at a local college is
the same setting as your high school biology lab. (Which, in a way, it is.) By week two, we had our own little
inside jokes. As I sank into my couch, I desperately hoped that her book would
live up to the real her. Continue reading here.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

There’s no doubt about it:Scarsdale village, with eight local eateries featuring
outdoor dining options, is the new European capital of Westchester.Meanwhile, Central Avenue is…
still Central Avenue.That being
said, it’s worth leaving the Village proper (and all the chocolate croissants
one could want) every now and then for fine dining at a pretty spot called Grace’s
Table, located at 324 Central Avenue in White Plains.

Grace’s
Table is part of the restaurant and marketplace team led by the Balducci and
Doria families, known for the Balducci’s markets, Grace’s Marketplace, and
Grace’s Trattoria.In other words,
as soon as I heard the name “Grace Balducci Doria” I made a reservation for
dinner.And you should too.The restaurant serves upscale American
fare for lunch Mon-Fri and dinner nightly.They also have a private party room in a wine cave on the
lower level.

Brett
and I arrived about 45 minutes early for an 8:30 reservation, checked in with
the hostess, and went to have a drink at the bar.“If you have a table ready any earlier, we’d love to take
it.It’s just that the babysitter
arrived and we had to escape while we could,” I explained.

“Understood.If you’d like, I could give you this
table right here,” she said.We
did like.We sat.(There are several rooms to choose
from, so you might want to poke around; we were happy to just sit.)

The
table next to us happened to be occupied by two couples from Edgemont that I’ve
known for years.We chatted for a
while and I told them that Brett and I were here on an official culinary
assignment.Everyone got very
excited and started telling me about their tasty selections.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Artist, yes. Successful businessman, sure. Snarky comment maker, indeed. But here are words I'd never thought I'd utter: I'd like to introduce you to my husband, Brett, the triathlete. When Brett and I met in 1996, he was merely a summertime tennis player, and, when I was not chain-smoking, I occasionally attended a step-aerobics class. In Central Park, we went to Sheep Meadow to hang out instead of going for a run around the reservoir. I thought we were perfectly matched in every way.When we moved in together in Brooklyn a few years later, we joined a gym and attended spin and yoga classes side by side. Skip ahead 12 years, and you will find that spin and yoga is where I still remain. Brett, however, has moved on. Way on.My husband now goes to the gym. A lot. He has a trainer. He does something called box jumps. He wears something called a weight vest. When I said I'd marry him in sickness and in health, I didn't know quite how healthy he meant.

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Welcome!

On the Verge is the name of the column I write for my local newspaper, The Scarsdale Inquirer, as well as for the Scarsdale10583.com website. I am also a blogger for The Huffington Post, and you can find all of those articles here as well. I have collected these musings all in one place, which is amazing considering that I'm not usually that organized. Anyway, here they all are, for the enjoyment of a wider audience of friends, family, and anyone else who might want to read along.